One Saskatchewan afternoon: The tale of a long-ago football game, and an iconic stadium

The envelope occupied a sliver of space in an abandoned filing cabinet, which is where this story finds its traction. Death pushes its way into our tale. There’s a long run, blood, a career that ends with a pratfall, the wardrobe choices of a vast mob.

Steve Mazurak, with that long run, is a character in this story. He’s frozen in a moment that’s spent four decades on a photographic negative buried in that envelope in downtown Saskatoon, until it was discovered and scanned onto a laptop.

The image, freed from its shackles, settled last week into Mazurak’s inbox, just a few blocks from where he once led the life of a football player.

Mazurak, during his gridiron days with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, was a sure-handed receiver, a precise route-runner, skilled in negotiating a crowd. He self-effacingly calls himself “a lumbering sloth” and a “lunchbox-type player.”

He examines the photo — there’s him, 41 years younger, running alone on the Taylor Field turf, towards a vast throng of celebrating fans. There’s not a defensive back in sight, because two of them collided, 40 or so yards away, and are still picking themselves off the turf. One of those two backs was making his CFL debut. He lasted one half, got benched, never played professional football again.

You can examine every face in that photo, hundreds of them, as Mazurak nears the end zone. Arms are upraised. Mouths are open in mid-scream. He is, at this frozen moment, a conquering hero.

“It’s 1975, a good old end zone shot, there must be 15 or 20 rows of folks, and it’s absolutely jam-packed,” Mazurak says, the pixels spread out before him. “The look of delight on those peoples’ faces … it’s just crazy.”

* * * * *

The game in question? Oct. 19, 1975. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won 36-27 over the Edmonton Eskimos at what was then Taylor Field, and is now Mosaic Stadium, and was before all that, Park de Young. It is, according to research by Tom Fuzesy, one of 747 games the Roughriders will have played on that particular old patch of Regina real estate, which is headed for a wrecking ball when the new stadium opens next season.

Every one of those 747 games — the last one goes this Saturday — carries its own sense of immediacy. Each is representative of the other. We picked this 1975 clash as our Mosaic Stadium prism, because those negatives tell a story all their own.

Roughriders’ receiver Rhett Dawson remembers nothing of the day, save for one broken play, which he can recite with great detail.

He marvels at players who, decades later, retain an encyclopedic knowledge of their games.

“I was moment-to-moment every game,” Dawson said this week from his office in Austin, Texas. “Each moment was its own world.”

Of the fans who crammed into Taylor Field that afternoon in 1975 — those still alive, anyways — we’re sure just a handful still remember this game that rocked their worlds for three hours on a breezy autumn day.

The StarPhoenix sent photographer Peter Wilson, and ran two photos in Monday’s paper. The rest, more than 120 different shots, sat untouched in a filing cabinet. They were discovered a few weeks ago in a dusty corner of the StarPhoenix basement, and brought to life.

They show the players, the fans, the band with its tuba. The best photo is the one showing Mazurak’s 73-yard touchdown run, with the fans freaking out. It’s never been published.

The “Taxi Squad” performs during a stoppage in play.Peter Wilson /
StarPhoenix

The game itself is historically notable, for a couple of reasons.

First, it was the last regular-season game the great Roughriders’ running back George Reed would ever play on that patch of grass, though nobody knew it at the time. He retired unexpectedly during the off-season.

Second, the game was played against a tragic backdrop. The day before, during a game with the host Calgary Stampeders, 23-year-old Hamilton Tiger Cats linebacker Tom Pate absorbed a clean block from Rick Galbos.

Pate started dying right there on McMahon Stadium’s brand new Astroturf.

It was an aneurysm, and he went from promising young man, to tragic figure, in the time it took to snap a football and collide with an opponent. One province over, one day later, they played a football game as Pate’s life slipped away in a Calgary hospital. He was still dying on Monday. Tuesday, he was gone.

The Roughriders knew all about Tom Pate.

A few months earlier, he was in their camp, wearing their colours, fully dressed for a practice when he got the tap on his shoulder. They’d just acquired Roger Goree, and had no need for him.

Pate, who won a national championship with the Nebraska Cornhuskers, salvaged his career with a trek to Hamilton. And late in the season, they made that trip to Calgary.

“I remember watching the game, seeing all that unfold,” Mazurak says. “Hoping and praying he was going to make it through. But it was gawdawful. Unnerving.

“A young guy, just coming up. It’s a dark memory.”

A short time later, Reed won the first-ever Tom Pate Memorial Award, which to this day is given to a CFL player for outstanding community service.

* * * * *

Thoughts of the young man, and his waning life, temporarily dissipated as the Eskimos and Roughriders took the field on Sunday afternoon.

Reed, one of the greatest running backs the CFL has ever seen, took a shot to the nose on his third carry from scrimmage. He played the game with blood stains on his pants, carried the football 23 times for 101 yards, absorbed a brutal beating that turned into a talking point at game’s end. In the fourth quarter, he ripped off a 17-yard run. Head coach John Payne sent backup Terry Bulych in to give Reed a breather, but the veteran shooed Bulych back to the bench.

“You wonder how he can take it, getting hit on all the time. But he knows how he feels more than I do.”

Bob Richardson (77) blocks for George Reed.Peter Wilson /
StarPhoenix

Wrote the Leader-Post’s Bob Hughes: “(Reed) has played with his usual defiance of injury and pain. He is hurt again, and they’re worried about him.

“The Man physically is wounded, but somewhere inside of him there is a rare kind of a gut instinct that will not let him quit. To him, quit is a four-letter word meaning loser. Now, there is nothing left to get hurt.”

* * * * *

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s how the game played out: The Roughriders, fighting for first place, improved to 10-4-1, and Edmonton fell to 10-4.

Mazurak scored touchdowns of 73 and 31 yards, less than two minutes apart in the second quarter. Reed, Dawson and Steve Molnar also scored majors.

Dave Cutler booted four field goals for the Eskimos, who got touchdown catches from Calvin Harrell and George McGowan.

Reed broke the Roughriders old record of 302 carries in a season, pushing it to 305.

Back in Regina, Mazurak — currently employed as the Roughriders vice president of sales and marketing — studies the picture of himself, and those fans.

“I’ve never seen that photo, and a couple of things come to mind,” Mazurak says. “No. 1, people talk about Rider Nation, the avid fans, our merchandise. I keep telling people the modern-era Roughriders didn’t invent Rider Nation. The Rider Nation was around a long time before the Jim Hopson and Steve Mazurak years in marketing.”

And the second thing?

“I look through the photograph,” he says, “and there’s only one Roughriders pennant showing up. There’s not a hat, not a green jersey, not a t-shirt, not anything green. The Rider Nation was alive and well and noisy, all of the above, but they weren’t green. It’s funny. You go back to those days and what we did for retail — we didn’t call it retail, and we didn’t call it merchandise back then. We called it people buying souvenirs. It was a different kind of a culture, I guess. A different kind of fan. A different kind of way the fans represented their club.”

Modern-day Saskatchewan sloshes through a fabric flood; green, green, green. Every closet has a Roughriders jersey, shirt, hat or baby bib. You can eat Rider-themed cereal and potato chips, get bugs off your windshield with Rider-blessed cleaner. That’s thanks to Mazurak’s efforts in his job with the Roughriders.

In 1975, you see a few pennants in the stands, a mesh ballcap or two with the iconic wheat sheaf and big S. Otherwise, 22,000-plus people wear their usual street clothes; bell-bottomed pants, red sweater, grey jacket, screaming for the green and white. Allegiances aside, this is no sea of green.

Roughriders fans celebrate a big play.Peter Wilson /
StarPhoenix

The 1975 throng has a cigarette in their collective right hand instead of a cell phone. Nobody takes a selfie. Tweeting is for whistles. When they go home, they’ll throw a Fleetwood Mac record on the turntable, or flick on the TV and watch the Sonny and Cher Show.

So it goes.

It’s different, but it’s also the same. Twenty-four men on a field, 110 yards long, tackling, blocking, dodging. Passes are caught and dropped, running backs bounce off-tackle. The crossing of a goal-line is a matter of unrestrained joy, or unabashed fury, depending on which colour did the crossing.

Dawson caught four Ron Lancaster passes for 118 yards that day, patrolling the same patch of land as Dean Griffing in 1936, Glenn Dobbs in 1951, Weston Dressler in 2015.

Dawson’s one touchdown came off a broken play, when Lancaster turned the wrong way on a handoff to Reed and found nobody there. He scrambled, spied Dawson, threw it, and celebrated a touchdown. Even today, Dawson recounts the broken play with crystal precision. The game? No. The play? Yes.

Dawson, a star with the Florida State Seminoles, joined the Roughriders late in the 1974 season after NFL stints in Houston and Minnesota.

His release by the Vikings sent him drifting into the perceived obscurity of the Saskatchewan prairie: “I was somewhere between disappointed and curious,” he says, but he quickly became a standout; one of the CFL’s elite receivers.

“I loved that team,” Dawson says. “We were a bunch of rejects from the NFL, or derelicts. We were all kind of cut from the same cloth. They’d say, ‘You’re a bunch of old guys.’ But we took it personal, went out and proved we weren’t.”

Dawson said he gets goosebumps, talking about Taylor Field and those long-ago days in Saskatchewan.

“It’s three of the best years of my life, and I really mean that,” he says. “Ronnie and I would make up plays at practice and run them, and Coach Payne would look at Ronnie and go ‘what was that play?’ Just the thrill of every little bit of it; being able to tell Ronnie I can beat this guy on the post, Ronnie would call a post, and I’d beat him.

“It’s like the most fun you ever had as a kid playing sandlot football, and the most fun you’ve ever had playing big-time football. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. I can truly say I’m glad I got cut by the Vikings.”

* * * * *

But Mosaic Stadium isn’t all about joy. The old place made many a football career, but it demolished a lot, too. So let’s spare a few words for Charles Miller, an Eskimos defensive back who was the Cleveland Browns’ 150th overall selection in the 1975 NFL draft.

Miller — who played under Bobby Bowden at West Virginia — ricocheted up to Canada after the draft, made his debut in this game, played the first half, defended so badly he got benched, and watched the rest of the affair from the sidelines. He never appeared in another game of professional football.

You can see Miller in one of the photos. The Eskimos gave him No. 28 before the game, put MILLER on the nameplate, trotted him onto the Taylor Field grass. The photo shows Roughriders receiver Leif Pettersen hauling in a long pass at the Eskimos 36. Miller, in full gallop, is five yards behind.

Mazurak’s two touchdowns both came at Miller’s expense; on the first, the rookie collided with fellow Eskimos DB John Farlinger, which allowed Mazurak to spring free on his 73-yard gallop.

On the second, in the words of StarPhoenix writer Larry Tucker, Mazurak “put some moves on Miller that were positively indecent” and scored from 31 yards out.

Miller had put together a fine career up to that point; high-school star, great collegiate run, NFL draft pick. But it ended, as many careers have, with one bad afternoon in Regina.

* * * * *

The day’s entertainment ended, finally, and everybody went home with smiles. A few weeks later, the Eskimos exacted revenge, defeating the Roughriders in the West Division final for a third straight season. Then they won the Grey Cup.

“We hated the damn Eskimos,” Mazurak says.

That October bout, like the games before it and the ones that came after, extracted a cumulative toll on the players. Some remember the clash; some forget. But their bodies offer a daily recall.

“The game is wearing and tearing,” Mazurak said. “You can see it in the way I walk and hobble, the way many of us walk and hobble. George shows that, as well. It comes with the game. We’re getting our knees replaced, our ankles replaced, our hips replaced.”

Mazurak, since re-joining the Roughriders, has joked often about the need to bulldoze the old place that’s brought him such a beguiling mix of pain and joy; has talked seriously about how it’s the one thing keeping the team from being truly big-league.

His wish is coming true, but he spares a nostalgic twinge for Mosaic Stadium, the place where he scored that 73-yard touchdown and brought the house down.

“It has so much meaning, and so much passion,” he says. “The different turfs that have been stained in Roughrider blood, and in fan blood. It’s just wonderful. We’re going to try our darnedest to give that old girl as good a sendoff as you can give a great stadium.”

And that will suit his old receiving mate Dawson, watching from afar, just fine.

“I’m 67 now,” Dawson says, “and realizing I’m one of those old farts we used to laugh at, the ones who would come watch practice when I was at college. It’s one more indication that time keeps rolling on, things get replaced. At some point years down the road, people will look back, and say, ‘I’m sure glad they’ve built this new stadium, because it’s so much nicer,’ and that’s all they’ll care about. But I have nothing but awesome memories of every day I got to be there.”

Those memories include a broken play and a touchdown on the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1975 — one game, of 747, on Saskatchewan’s most hallowed ground.

Related

This Week's Flyers

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.